ISP Closes Webmail After Spammers Get Addresses

An anonymous reader writes "Error prone British ISP PlusNet, who you might remember for accidentally deleting 700GB of customer's e-mail last year, have done it again with a major security gaffe. Their webmail service was compromised this week, and spammers got hold of customers' e-mail addresses who they've been happily spamming away ever since. They've since made the decision to close their webmail service, in the ultimate admission of incompetence for the now BT owned ISP. In an e-mail to their customers, Network director Phil Webb goes on to recommend that their customers install security software, along with telling them that they shouldn't call up to complain. One might suggest that they need to practice what they preach."

Comments

Not surprising

[Zelos]

Not all that surprising, this is a company whose account password policy is 5-8 characters, all lower case, no non-alphanumeric characters. I've been with plus.net for ages, they seemed fantastic after my truly awful experiences with Demon, but they've been much worse recently - they broke routing recently so that I couldn't connect to my work VPN for days. Anybody recommend any other decent UK ISPs? I hear good things about Pipex.

The same Freedom2Surf that were bought by PIPEX?

[TheScienceKid]

PIPEX are looking to be bought out. Maybe by tiscali.

Get a real ISP, like Black Cat Networks or Andrews and Arnold Ltd. Alternatively, UKFSN (an Enta.net reseller) are pretty good, if you're tighter around the pocket.

[Captcha: protests]